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Are HTML sitemaps still in use today?

I'm trying to help a client understand the importance of having a well-organized HTML site map as a method of helping usability. As part of this process, I spent some time searching for good examples of well-organized HTML site maps, and found that many sites don't offer one (including SEOmoz). I'm wondering if webmasters and/or SEOers think they aren't valuable any longer?

4 Responses

It doesn't hurt to have them, but I don't think there is any real benefit to them anymore for the search engines. They should be able to find all of your pages by following the regular links on your site. That being said, I still have them on my sites.

I still use "static" sitemaps with my clients. These can be especially welcomed by users if you have a large site with many categories/sub-categories. Of course from a usability standpoint, your site navigation should pose no problem to your customers finding what they are looking for :)

It's always interesting to see how sitemap.html performs in terms of pageviews. According to Analytics at least, many users find them useful -- and that's enough for me to usually want to recommend including one.

Try it, test it, and if users find it valuable then keep it. Like it or not, I think it's true to say that there's still a small segment of web users who use sitemaps as on of their main methods of navigation so I think on that basis, there's an argument to include them.

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